My curls return in rain and in sudden wind. They returned that day, on the beach, standing beside a sand wall, scooped out by wind. We were on vacation, him from his regular self, and me from the self that pretended he was truly like this.
The man he usually was would run after you with coasters lest wet rings from the glass touch the table. The man he usually was also liked measuring for curtains, cooking pasta from scratch and on special occasions, composing poems, not any poems but sonnets and not any sonnets, but Petrarchan sonnets – no simple a-b-a-b for him. He was after Laura. In fact, he married one in the end.
But before that, we were on a beach, standing amid dunes when it began to rain. At first, it was a drizzle and then it became, not rain, but a breath of water. There was no sense of it falling upon us. Where there had been air, there was now water, a sheen of it, then someone inhaled and then it was gone. In between the breath of water coming and going, my hair began to curl – at first, the ends, and then, the short bangs around my forehead. He touched the curls gently, bemused. I felt tender, like a snail, the garden variety, that moves very slowly on wet grass. The curls only emerged in rain. “My hair is returning to its natural state,” I said to him.
“Then why,” he said, flattening one swirl of black against my neck, “why does it wait for rain to reveal itself?”
I don’t know, but it felt like a revelation. In fact, it was. In fact, that’s what I wrote in my journal that night. I wrote:
My hair returns to its true state in the rain and other illuminations that come on a beach where the moon was invisible but present, in other words, Pilgrim, it happened during the day. John…whatizname Wayne that’s it, in a movie about plains Indians, to show his love for them, said yah-at-ey. We were eating popcorn when I saw this. I stopped eating because it blew my mind that I knew he was playing Indian, playing along, meaning I knew he spoke a Navajo greeting to Indians who were not Navajo.
Another illumination along with the curls. Once illuminated, the train wagons keep going across the plains up into the mountains, and towards the sea where we stand, him and I, because I am not done with that moment, with that sudden sheen of rain, that breath of water and the man standing before me.
He had a face full of sorrow he had earned. His voice was what you would call decorous. Listening to him, everyone gentled and dogs that came bounding into rooms, sat down at his feet.
His name was Ricardo, but I called him mi vaquero. He wasn’t Spanish. When you asked him what he did for a living, he’d say, “I’m not a sailor.” Why does this matter? You’ll understand soon enough.
I imagined Ricardo was blue because one half of him was Scot and I remember another Scot telling me a joke – which, whether it’s repeated often or not in Scotland, I don't know but the joke goes, “My natural color is blue. I have to stand out in the sun for a few hours to get white.”
Mi vaquero was like that. That day on the beach with the invisible moon, the visible sun whitened him beyond blue. As my curls returned, he gained a cream pallor tinged with pink. The color emboldened him, and looking at his stance, which was lean, long legged, I felt like he was going off to war, some place from which he would not return.
He touched my curls again and kissed me. I tasted rain on his tongue, mixed with salt from the popcorn that he had spilled on me in bed watching John Wayne. After the kiss, he held my hand. As we walked on the boardwalk, I felt like other people, who have boyfriends for years at a time and this is what they do some days - they walk hand in hand on a boardwalk and exclaim about a mango margarita which a waiter from one of the restaurants we passed gave to me before realizing it had been ordered by someone else. The other girl looked nothing like me, except for our breasts. We were the same cup size. I narrowed my eyes to gauge, yes, that much he had got right.
But the rest was off - she didn't have curls to begin with, her skin was pale, her eyes were green, and she had an oval face and bow-shaped mouth while my face is round and my mouth wide and full-lipped.
Stung at the mistake - which the waiter realized almost immediately - I shook the ice in the plastic glass and drank the margarita then and there. Ricardo laughed; the waiter gasped, “Senorita,” and the girl made an o with her lips. We walked on with the margarita in the glass and me with my wide mouth and Ricardo, mi vaquero, humming, Rawhide, Rawhide.
We made furious love that night. Afterwards, he traced the edges of my hair, where the memory of the curls still lived, and I let him. That’s when I knew it was the end. He didn't. He said it was the best sex he’d ever had; he said people look all their lives for this kind of thing, this connection. I wondered if he meant sex or connection, but he fell asleep before I could ask. I lay there holding his one blue hand.
I had met him at the office. He was a friend of another guy who worked there. He came in one causal Friday at lunch time to see this friend and brought in mead cakes he had baked himself from mead he had brewed himself.
What struck me was how he said my name. Most everyone usually hesitates at the first M and by the last Z they are done for. But he said my name with ease on that first day, reading it off my desk and offering me some cake. Even as I bit into it, I was watching his lips say my name and then I noticed he was watching me too.
He invited me to dinner and cooked wild rice with green peppers that plundered my taste buds first. I say first because later that night, his kiss plundered as well. It took without asking even though I would have given permission. After he kissed me, he told me he’d never done that, kissed first, asked later.
I wonder, I said, if it’s because you’ve been focused on water rings on tables and other minutiae of domesticity. I was kidding, not knowing it was the truth. After he had recovered from my statement, he said that was the truth and that he had only been divorced a week.
My wife, he paused, my ex-wife is Ingrid, he said.
Ingrid. I gasped. We all knew her or rather of her. She was the first and only female plumber in our town.
What happened, I asked.
He said she had up and run away with a sailor.
Why? I placed his hand on my breast, so he knew I meant no harm by the question.
Because, he began and kissed me again. That distracted us for a while.
Later he said he had asked her the same question. But she wouldn't reply and just stood there.
I imagined her in that silence, standing with her toned arms from all the wrenches she had wielded. Everyone in town got to see those arms because she wore black tank tops to show them off. With her red hair, she looked pretty spectacular.
So he had asked again.
Finally, she had said, You’re not a sailor. That’s why. I should never have said yes to begin with to a man who is a farmer at heart without sea legs. (On their honeymoon to Crete, Ricardo said he had spent five hours heaving over the toilet.)
That day he asked her, she was wearing a tank top with Poepeye on it, he said, and that ought to have given him a clue. But it didn’t.
After that, when people asked him what he did for a living he’d say, I’ll tell you what I’m not. I’m not a sailor.
At first, he began saying Mi amor because I said it to him. But later, he did it because it made him feel connected to his name. If you’re called Ricardo, he said, you really ought to say mi amor well, and rolled the r. Truth be told, I said it better. But I never told him that.
Once, early into what I call our courtship - because it was that - he wooed me, wined me, drank me, fed me – once, we drove on a long stretch of road to a mesa. About an hour into the drive, he pulled over and when I turned to ask why, he kissed me tender. The sweetness of it kept me silent the whole journey, my hand on his hand which lay on my knee, only moving when he had to shift gears.
Once, at night, he left a day lily on the pillow beside me and slept on the couch so I’d wake to that scent of flower.
Once, when I gave him keys to do laundry at my house, he washed all the dishes in the sink.
That man, him with eyes that shifted color depending on what he wore and also depending on me. In the summer, his eyes were different shades depending on how brown or browner I’d get.
Why are we ending it, he said the next morning.
In his eyes, I saw rain forming over a distant sea. The blue in his skin shone through. It felt like the first time I was seeing him in his natural state and I knew that I did not match. Especially the drapes. I would never match the drapes, the ones he would one day measure. They would have lace edges and paisley stitching. They would have to be hemmed to fit the non-standard window which he would have made standard if he could. And then, there were those coasters and wet glasses and rings on the table.
He was watching me, but I looked straight through him to the bed covers.
All I said to him was, trust me, I know.
How can you be so far seeing, he said. He cupped the edge of my hip and squeezed. This is real, he said. This is all there is.
I said, no, mi amor, this thing, however real, will edge you out of the life that comes naturally to you.
He said no and kissed me fierce, as if the sea meant nothing to him.
He left after that, as I asked him to. Did I expect such obedience, I asked myself, in the years that followed.
He left and the weight of his hand on my hip, his marveling at the curls which made themselves known just once in our acquaintance, the mead cakes, the Petrarchan sonnets, all these came with me on a road that ended suddenly.
Ahead of me, I saw a beach with a moon in sight and behind me, the way I’d come, I heard crying and saw another man, my husband of fifty years sobbing into a coffee cup as the doctor gave him the news. The coffee cup wobbled and spilled dark on the tiled floor.
Reflexively, I bent to clean it but my hand touched sand instead. And then I saw Ricardo at the beach. His back was to me, but I knew him at once. I stared. I heard my breath rise and fall. Gently, I touched the hair that had long left me. I touched where the curls used to fall. All the other sounds became the sea. I rose, then, and went to Ricardo in the language we never spoke but always understood. It began to rain.
Shebana Coelho is a writer and director, originally from India now based in New Mexico. She received a Fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Fulbright to Mongolia. Her short stories and poems have been published in Slice, Chronogram, Wildness, The Nottingham Review, Panorama a Journal of Intelligent Travel, and Muse A journal, among others.
Photo by leguico on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND